Audio Engineer (Speech / TTS Audio Specialist): French

What you'll do

This is production audio work for machine learning. Mercor needs audio engineers to prepare French speech recordings so they can be used to train TTS and speech models, where a stray breath, click or level jump in the source ends up baked into the synthetic voice.

The ad describes three strands:

• Cleanup: silence trimming, breath reduction or removal, de-clicking, de-essing and noise reduction on French voice recordings
• Technical QA: checking for clipping and distortion, background noise and artefacts, and consistent loudness and level balance, against strict specifications for ML training pipelines
• Linguistic QA: judging French pronunciation accuracy, naturalness and fluency, which is why native or near-native French is required

It is volume work. You process large batches and are expected to keep both consistency and throughput, and you may work alongside teams handling voice talent recordings and model training.

Who qualifies

• Native or near-native French with a good ear for the fine detail of French speech
• Experience editing speech or voice recordings specifically; the ad stresses that music production alone does not count
• A solid grasp of dialogue audio standards and the defects typical of recorded speech
• Hands-on use of iZotope RX, Pro Tools or comparable restoration software
• Experience with high-volume audio datasets or structured workflows

Preferred: work with TTS vendors or platforms, speech ML or voice AI dataset projects, audio QA or labelling pipelines, and directing or editing French voice talent.

The ideal profile the ad sketches is someone comfortable with repetitive, high-precision work at scale who understands how the needs of a synthetic voice dataset differ from a normal voice-over edit. Dubbing, audiobook and podcast editors working in French are the obvious fit.

What it pays

$50 per hour, a single published rate. That is the highest French figure in this set of Mercor audio listings: the French Sonic audit role pays $41.50 and the French audiobook QA role $15–20. The difference reflects the tooling skill required.

Weekly payments on Stripe or Wise. The ad excludes H-1B and STEM OPT candidates. No weekly hours, duration or location requirement are stated.

Worth knowing

Good:

• A professional rate for professional restoration skills
• Fully remote, on your own schedule, with no country restriction
• Direct exposure to how TTS datasets are prepared, a useful niche for audio engineers

Less good:

• High-volume, repetitive batch editing; the ad says so plainly
• You will likely need your own licensed tools (iZotope RX, Pro Tools or similar); the ad does not say whether any are provided
• No stated hours or project length, so income is hard to predict
• Contractor terms: can be extended, shortened or ended early

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as an hourly remote contract, read from the live listing on 24 September 2026. The rate, tools and requirements above are the ad's own. See Mercor.